Goodbye, Stanley

Bernard Weisberger taught history at Antioch, Wayne State, the University of Chicago, the University of Rochester and Vassar before becoming a full time freelance historian and a columnist at American Heritage.

Stanley
Kutler died yesterday and we are all poorer for his passing. Our
profession has lost a superlative historian, the country has lost a
genuine patriot, and on this gray morning here in Chicago I feel
particularly impoverished because I have also lost an incomparable
friend.

I
didn’t get to know Stan personally until some fifteen or twenty
years ago, when I had recently moved to Chicago and a mutual friend
brought us together at a lunch. Thereafter, whenever he came to the
city to visit family members, or to work with actors and directors on
a play he was writing about Nixon, we would meet to eat in one of the
restaurants that he knew and liked. In recent years, when arthritis
and the heart disease made it too hard for him to get around, I would
take the bus to Madison to spend an afternoon with him. A six hour
round trip for two hours in his company was one of the best bargains
of my lifetime.

Sharing
a meal with Stan was always an experience to be savored. He would do
much, if not most of the talking, and it was a pleasure to listen.
Omniscient in all things from the records of the Cleveland Indians
whom he followed while growing up to the minutiae of relatively
obscure Supreme Court cases, his power of recall never failed to
amaze me. When we first met he immediately recalled that my daughter
Beth had been in one of his undergraduate classes years earlier. But
what I recall most vividly is his laughter. He clearly enjoyed
whatever he did, and approached any subject with robust humor, sharp
intelligence, and a penetrating eye for pretense. He was generous in
praise to those he admired, forthright but not nasty in skewering
those whom he didn’t.

If
he took pleasure in deflating some fellow academic’s view, you
could be sure that it was based on a prodigious familiarity with that
professor’s works. His deep respect for learning shone through that
wry wit, and his genuine appreciation of the Constitution sparkled
throughout his running commentary. I think that one of the reasons
he became such a formidable expert in the history of the wars of
Watergate was because he was truly angry at the cast of rogues and
liars filling the ranks of the Committee to Reelect the President
(how appropriately named CREEP) that summer of 1972, up to ane
especially including the Unindicted Co-Conspirator in the White
House.

Stan
was a fighting progressive down to the wire. The blogs he wrote for
online “publications” like Truthdig crackled with bite and
insight. But he was never self-righteous and knew that there are
always fools to be found on both sides of an argument. He was angry
but always accurate. The nation owes him a debt of gratitude for
not letting Nixon and his heirs get away with re-writing the record.
That, to him, was the real crime. History was his pleasure and his
passion, and history had to rest on the solid foundations of good
documentation and thorough investigation.

What
I would not give for just one more hour of hearty eating,
down-to-earth conversation and boisterous laughter with Stanley. He
was simply “best of breed” in our calling.